The scene is a familiar one around the world: Swimmers play in the waves while a group plays volleyball on the beach, and people sit on plastic chairs around plastic tables under blue-and-white umbrellas. But this beach sits on the east coast of North Korea, near the coastal industrial city of Wonsan.

And the image is from a digitally-stitched patchwork of photos assembled to give viewers an immersive, 360-degree look at some of the country’s key political sites, as well as some corners of the isolated country that are less well-known to the outside world.

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This isn’t an undercover expose. All of the photos were taken with the permission of North Korea’s state-owned travel agency, Korea International Travel Company.

The photographer, Aram Pan, a 37-year-old Singaporean freelancer who creates virtual tours for hotels and real-estate companies for a living, first dreamed up the idea in early 2012, he said in a phone interview last week.

Mr. Pan says he reached out to North Korean authorities through intermediaries based outside the country.

After securing North Korea’s approval, Mr. Pan joined a private one-week tour to the country last August. He was taken on a standard tour of the capital, Pyongyang, where he shot the photos that would become the 360-degree panoramas of the Juche Tower, the purported birthplace of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, and the Arirang Mass Games. He also created spherical panoramas of a Pyongyang theme park, two subway stations and the country’s revolutionary art studio.

Outside the capital, he snapped panoramas of the Nampo Dam, on North Korea’s western coast; the Mount Kumgang resort, which was open to South Korean tourists until 2007; the Demilitarized Zone at Panmunjom, as seen from the North; and the beach near Wonsan, called Galma Beach.

To be sure, such a project doesn’t come without ethical quandaries. Over the weekend, Stephan Haggard, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, called Mr. Pan’s project “particularly naive” in a scathing blog post for Washington’s Peterson Institute for International Economics, which generally takes a dim view of travel to North Korea.

In his post, Mr. Haggard counts Mr. Pan as one of the regime’s “foreign apologists,” arguing that no photos taken inside the country with official sanction can fulfill the aim of capturing the “true North Korea.”

For his part, Mr. Pan says he’s no Communist, and that prior to his trip last August, he had no special ties with North Korea beyond what he read in the news.

He says he approached the North Koreans directly because he didn’t want to undertake the project in a “sneaky” way. (It could also be difficult to take the photos needed for 360-degree panorama without arousing suspicion.)

“Anyone is welcome to make their own assumptions and comments. Isn’t that what free speech is all about?” Mr. Pan wrote in a follow-up email. “For very obvious reasons, I have chosen not to discuss politics in my project. You don’t need to be a genius to figure that out.”

Mr. Pan adds that he wasn’t barred from taking any photos, except when he made one request to take a photo of North Korean soldiers helping construct a highway. He was told that photographing soldiers was forbidden–a restriction that is broadly applied to North Korea’s visitors.

Mr. Pan says his panoramas are mostly untouched by digital enhancements, except where stitching two photos together resulted in half a person, or a person with two heads.

Mr. Pan says he didn’t get paid “a single cent” for the project. Most of his air travel and other expenses were covered by his sponsors, which include a tour agency specializing in North Korea travel based in neighboring Malaysia, which has diplomatic ties with North Korea and which is one of the few countries, other than China, with direct commercial flights to North Korea. He covered his own equipment costs, and a domain provider in Singapore agreed to host his website.

Mr. Pan says that his August trip was meant to be just the first in a series to North Korea. For his initial foray, he limited his requests to the least contentious spots, but he says he hopes to branch out in subsequent journeys, photographing “some places that are more intimate with the people.”

Over the weekend, Mr. Pan says he was given approval for two more trips.

Despite the rising number of travelers, North Korea remains one of the world’s most closed countries. Through his images, Mr. Pan says he wants to offer people outside the country a “virtual portal” into the North Koreans’ world.

“Right now, the only way that people can interact with North Korea is through tourism and I believe it’s a good idea that more people try to enter North Korea and interact with them and to help them experience who we are,” Mr. Pan said in the phone interview.

As for the beach photo, which Mr. Haggard described as “not particularly interesting” and “a beach that could pretty much be anywhere.”

Mr. Pan says that that was kind of the point. Recounting that day, he says he spotted the beach while passing on the highway and asked one of his guides to stop. They obliged, he said.

“The beach surprised me because it was something that wasn’t scheduled,” Mr. Pan says. “That was for real.”